Nylon as a building block for transparent electronic devices?

21-Aug-2019 - Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) led by Dr. Kamal Asadi have solved a four decade long challenge of producing very thin nylon films that can be used for instance in electronic memory components. The thin nylon films are several 100 times thinner than human hair ...

On the way to printable organic light emitting diodes

12-Jul-2019 - Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are used today in many electronic devices for display applications, ranging from smartphones to televisions. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) have now succeeded in developing a new design for these LEDs. They have been able ...

In the active centre of carbon dioxide conversion

Scientists reveal the features of efficient carboxylase enzymes

12-Jul-2019 - In order to overcome the climate crisis, two measures are required: The reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and removal of CO2 from the earth atmosphere. The latter is the goal of Tobias Erb's research group at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg. Their ...

How living matter self-organizes through chemical signals

Scientists show new mechanism of self-organization of living matter

08-Jul-2019 - Cells and microorganisms produce and consume all sorts of chemicals, from nutrients to signaling molecules. The same happens at the nanoscale inside cells themselves, where enzymes catalyze the production and consumption of the chemicals needed for life. In new work published in Physical Review ...

Novel approach to self-assembling mobile micromachines

27-Jun-2019 - Building a robot with many different components is a challenging task, even more so at the micro scale. Very convenient, if the parts self-assemble. The self-assembly of particles is nothing new. In fact, it has been achieved for decades. Magnetic particles interacting under rotating magnetic ...

Laser flashes for polarized electron and positron beams

14-Jun-2019 - Simulations show new methods for efficient polarization: Physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg proposed novel methods for generation of relativistic spin polarized electron and positron beams. Using extensive simulations, they found three different scenarios ...

Direct Observation of Giant Molecules

Physicists achieved to form giant diatomic molecules and optically detect them afterwards by using a high-resolution objective

07-Jun-2019 - The tiny size of conventional diatomic molecules in the sub-nanometer regime hinders direct optical resolution of their constituents. Physicists from the Quantum Many Body Division at MPQ led by Prof. Immanuel Bloch were able to bind pairs of highly excited atoms at a distance of one micrometer. ...

Simulating nature’s cosmic laboratory, one helium droplet at a time

27-Mar-2019 - Two astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and from the University of Jena have found an elegant new method to measure the energy of simple chemical reactions, under similar conditions as those encountered by atoms and molecules in the early solar system. Their method promises ...

Turning a molecule into a coherent two-level quantum system

08-Mar-2019 - Organic dye molecules are commonly known from color pigments or from fluorescence microscopy in biology. Although as any other molecule, they are fundamentally quantum mechanical objects made of a small number of atoms, they are usually not associated with quantum technologies, not even within ...

New material for chemistry text books

Calcium carbonate forms a previously unknown aqueous crystal structure

06-Mar-2019 - Even the well-known can sometimes surprise. Calcium carbonate (CaCO3), also known colloquially as lime or chalk, is a mineral that has already been thoroughly analysed by chemists. But chemistry books, in which it is listed as occurring in five different crystal structures, now need to be ...